Helter Skelter, Gimme Shelter

By
Dr. Alexander Sumach
on January 2, 1998

Helter Skelter, Gimme Shelter

Sixty-three year-old murderer Charles Manson, currently serving a life sentence in a California prison for orchestrating acid-wonked hippy women to commit a series of grisly celebrity murders during “The Summer of Love” (1969), has recently been found guilty of trafficking illegal drugs from the maximum security jail cell he has called home for nearly 30 years.

Exactly what kind of drugs or the quantities involved has not been revealed. The illicit introduction of any forbidden material presents a serious dilemma for fortress America, for this breach in prison security at this particular address is of special dread to the drug prohibitionists. The message here is that there is no place left in America that recreational drugs cannot reach.

Dope to Charlie Manson in lockup is perhaps the most outrageously incorrect act which illustrates how the War on Drugs is not on top of things to the extent that the spankers of men would have us believe and pay for. Here’s the mega-taboo winding up in the most hopeless hole in Utopia, zipping past the crosshairs of the machine gun sites to satisfy euphoric intentions. There’s drugs in the Death Row Giftshoppe, your host, Charlie Manson.

Dealing drugs inside prison was not Mr Manson’s first clash with good order under incarceration. Some years before, he annoyed a fellow inmate who set him on fire in revenge ? a serious lapse of pacifism for a Hare Krisna devotee gone bad.

In March of this year, Mr Manson was denied parole for his terrible crimes for the ninth consecutive time. Caught with drugs in jail soon after his parole rejection, Manson gave no clue as to where the drugs came from, but proximity suggests prison staff involvement.

In the 1960’s, young Charlie Manson was a part-time resident of Vancouver. Busking with his guitar on Vancouver street corners, gobbling pure Owsley acid and flipping out in Stanley Park, young Manson moved easily amongst the acid-whammied local stars who just sort of put up with his wild paranoid ideas set to music. Women seemed particularly attracted to Manson’s good looks and tortured poet persona.

Leaving Canada for California, Manson leeched onto the “Beach Boys” entourage where he was able to induce this dope-dazzled surfer family of song to actually record a Manson-penned tune, and release it as the B-side crap filler for a minor woop-oo-woo Beach Boy hit. The Manson song “Cease to Exist” never became very popular.